Thinking of moving your company's email to the Cloud?
Are you thinking of moving your company’s email to a cloud based system such as Office 365 or Rackspace Hosted Exchange but a bit scared of the interruptions it could cause or the unknown? Here are some tips, tricks, and benefits we implement for our clients.
First let’s go over some of the benefits of a Hosted Cloud Based Email service versus having a physical server siting in your office:
- Unlimited scalability – you can add as many email accounts as you want without ever having to buy a new server
- Unlimited storage space – unlike old physical office email servers where you constantly had to archive or delete messages these new hosted solutions allow you to keep just about an unlimited amount of email. Great for all you pack rats out there!
- Enterprise level security for a small business price – our cloud based email uses high-end enterprise class datacenters, redundant power, redundant internet connections, and spam/virus protection scanning that most small business could never afford on their own
- Low cost – this is always the CEO/CFO’s favorite – no longer do you need to purchase thousands of dollars of servers, Microsoft licensing, support, and maintenance. With our cloud solutions it is all included for a small monthly service fee
- Always on always available from anywhere - the cloud based email servers are ran in top-tier datacenters which means even if the power or Internet is out at your San Diego office your email is still flowing without a hitch
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How to make a smooth transition from your old physical email servers to a Hosted Cloud solution:
- Use a Live Migration service – we perform the transition for our clients in Real-Time which means virtually no interruption in send/receive of email. When we say Go! Everything is instantly working and accessible on the new cloud service. It takes quite a bit more leg work from your IT Service Provider than a traditional stop and go weekend type transition but all your employees will be happy because their work is not interrupted
- Plan ahead – schedule at least 2 weeks ahead to give everyone in the office a heads up because a few settings will need to be changed on everyone’s mobile phones and computers
- Backup!! – be sure you have working and tested backups from the cut-over day just in case something doesn’t go as planned
- Migrate your Autocomplete Outlook email addresses – you know how your favorite colleagues email addresses auto populate when you start typing in the TO: field – that’s called the Autocomplete – by default those typically don’t get transferred over – which makes everyone freak out! So be sure to tell your IT Support team you want those moved over also!
- Do it afterhours on a weekend – scheduled the migration at your least busy time just in case you have some hiccups along the way.
- Some items do NOT transfer – there are some odd caveats such as personal distribution lists, archives, and a few others that usually cannot be migrated – be sure to ask your IT Consultant what these are so there are no surprises down the road
- Ask about possible extra fees – some Cloud Based Hosted Exchange email service providers charge extra for items such as extra storage, data backup, Blackberry use, compliant archiving, etc…
At Windward Technology we perform live cloud email migrations for clients all the time and can help make sure yours goes flawlessly as well. Give us a call if you have any questions.
See Also - Tips Why Data Backup and Disaster Recovery are Critical to Your Business
